I'm thinking about organising a competition to find an Irish person who has not yet shaken Bertie Ahern's hand. Kissing him or landing a cream pie on him would also be considered part of the broad category of handshaking, as would shaking his car, though I include the latter with considerable reluctance, writes Breda O'Brien
The prize would be a personally autographed billboard picture of Bertie for the front garden. I haven't cleared the autograph bit with Bertie yet, but I am sure that it will be no problem. The Taoiseach aims to please and he has loads of billboards.
Anyway, it would give him a chance to shake the hand of the last person to have escaped. The really hard part will be to find anyone who qualifies for the prize.
Why is Bertie Ahern so popular? This is the man who casually announces the dissolution of the Dáil to three people, thus denying departing TDs like Albert Reynolds and David Andrews a last sentimental visit to the chamber.
Though naturally enough, that would not be the foremost crime on say, Reynolds' mind, if and when he broods on the boy Ahern. There would be the small matter of having been given the Judas kiss on the presidential nomination vote. In fairness, though, Albert, the man who is alleged to have said that a revolving door in his office would have been useful on the occasion on which he sacked or demoted most of the front bench, might have a respect for Ahern's style. Or then again, perhaps not.
I first met Ahern when he still wore an anorak. At the launch of a promotional video I had made for the Community Games, Bertie turned up all by himself and stood there in his usual unassuming way.
He was swooped upon by a female of my acquaintance who shook his hand with great enthusiasm as if she had known him all her life. Bertie, who had never seen her before, was unfazed and entered completely naturally into a chat with this newly discovered lifelong friend. A pair of them in it, as my dear mother would have said.
No other politician turned up to the launch. That event well over a decade ago sums up to some extent Bertie's style. Low-key, personal, ever present and your best friend as long as he is looking at you.
Bertie has so many acceptable "lad" characteristics, from the love of GAA to the loyalty to pints in the local, that it distracts attention from the fact that his instincts in many ways are closer to those we associate with women. That, by the way, is not intended as an insult to women, but women tend to concentrate on the human connections in any situation and so does Bertie. He does not like conflict. He likes to achieve consensus, to give everyone enough so that they will go away mollified if not exactly happy.
He tells people the part of the truth that he thinks they most want to hear, even though the part of the truth he tells to the next person might make the first person splutter.
His brain is constantly computing how he can reconcile the irreconcilable, how far he can nudge something in a direction without rupturing the connections with any of the people in the picture.
This is both his greatest strength and greatest weakness. In well-nigh intractable situations like the North, it is invaluable. Patience, satisfaction with infinitesimal advances which would frustrate the hell out of someone else, the ability to keep giant egos and competing traditions on board, all of this has been vital to the peace process. But when it comes to hard decisions, such as giving someone the boot, Bertie is not your man. Although it stems from a desire to keep everyone happy, this fondness for burying the hatchet in someone's back rather than the chest has earned him the loathing of those who have had the Bertie treatment, and of their supporters.
Bertie is essentially a pragmatist. Most men would be too afraid of being called a big girl's blouse to spend thousands in taxpayers' money on make-up a year, but I suspect, that while Bertie may not be mad about it, once someone sold him on the idea that looking like Desperate Dan on a bad skin day was not good for the image, he just shrugged and got on with it.
Not that everything will be sacrificed to image. For every frustrated person grinding their teeth every time Bertie eliminates another "th" from the English language, there are a hundred who appreciate that he never attempted to substitute an AA Roadwatch accent for his flat Dublinese. Sometimes the accent is an advantage.
Some months ago, Bertie had to speak after Sir Anthony O'Reilly at a function in Belvedere College. Sir Anthony delivered as usual, an immaculately prepared, witty and quite long speech.
Never known as a great orator, some wondered how Bertie would follow it. He began: "I'd like to congratulate Belvedere College on de great job dey did in teaching Tony O'Reilly how to speak. A pity dey didn't teach him how to stop." Maybe Bertie is so popular because he moves with relative ease between new and old Ireland and yet belongs fully to neither. He is religious enough to earn gibes from Pat Rabbitte about wearing ashes on his forehead, yet is very publicly not living up to the marital standards demanded by his church.
He embodies the often ruthless pragmatism of the newly emerged business culture in Ireland.
Yet here is the eye-popping bit. For a man whose bottom line is getting back into power, he is openly willing to risk the political fallout from the fact that he is anti-abortion.
He has a genius for popular culture, even if the pointy-heads hate him. Ireland is changing, and in his contradictions and inconsistencies, the scary reality is that Bertie does not just embody the zeitgeist, he is the zeitgeist. But even scarier is the fact that his greatest asset is the Opposition.
Even the 21 per cent who don't think he is doing much of a job as a leader have to contend with two words - Michael and Noonan. Need I say more?